Crisis looms for Sharon

The public consensus that the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has marshalled behind his policies cracked yesterday. Polls showed him receiving his lowest public approval rating in months, and 50 more combat reservist officers added their names to a petition calling on soldiers to refuse to serve in the occupied territories.

There are now 104 signatories to the petition, which is the most serious domestic challenge to his policies on the Palestinians since he came to power one year ago.

"We will not take part in the war for the peace of the settlements," said the petition, originally published in the press on January 25. "We will not fight beyond the Green Line [Israel's 1967 border with the West Bank] in order to rule, expel, destroy, blockade, assassinate, starve and humiliate an entire people."

The protest has rattled Mr Sharon and the army, which was swift to attribute "political" rather than moral motives to its conscientious objectors.

"This is incitement to rebellion," the army's chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, said yesterday.

Four petitioners have been suspended from officer duties; the others are to face disciplinary measures, the army said. The punishments follow prison terms imposed on 49 reservists for refusing to serve in the occupied territories since the intifada erupted 16 months ago.

The difference with the latest protest is its public character, and the sympathetic hearing it has received.

Even the former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, Ami Ayalon, told Israeli television that he felt "a lot of empathy for the reserve officers" when they were asked to execute "blatantly illegal" orders.

"As far as I'm concerned, too few soldiers are refusing such orders. To shoot an unarmed youth is a blatantly illegal order. I am very worried by the number of Palestinian children shot in the last year."

The protest also resonates with the predominant public mood of despair in Israel at the continuing violent confrontation with the Palestinians.

This has seen Mr Sharon's popularity ratings drop from 57% in December to 48%, the daily newspaper Maariv said.

Writing in Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper last week, the columnist Nahum Barnea said the latest Palestinian attack in west Jerusalem had made people more pessimistic about Mr Sharon. "They knew their prime minister was no better than they were: neither they nor he have an answer."

Avraham Burg, the Labour Speaker of the Israeli parliament, insisted this week that he would address the Palestinian parliament in Ramallah, despite Mr Sharon's campaign to ostracise the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

"The occupation corrupts, or, more accurately, the occupation has already corrupted," Mr Burg told the knesset.

·Ariel Sharon held secret talks with three senior members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's inner circle this week, the first such meeting since he became prime minister, a Palestinian official said.